Into Super Bowl Valley Of Dearth Wrote The 2,000

January 24, 1986|By Steve Daley.

NEW ORLEANS — Clutching notebooks and minicams, exploring their chests for the whereabouts of silver identity pins issued by the National Football League, a brigade of reporters filed through a runway on the field level of the New Orleans Superdome Tuesday morning, the better to make the acquaintance of the Chicago Bears and New England Patriots.

Even in the land of filet gumbo and planned hilarity, this is the part of the Super Bowl that gives both sides--the press and the players--indigestion. Two decades of exploding Super Bowl reportage have turned a much sought-after week in a warm-water port into a forced journalistic march, with the NFL riding herd.

For the athletes, an army of strange faces draped with curiosity is a redoutable image. On the other hand, listening to a 265-pound defensive lineman contend that the best way to hunt rattlesnakes is to use a reporter as bait will put you off your complimentary Danish and coffee.

On both sides of the interview equation, well into Super Bowl XX week and counting, some are ready for the hoopla and many are not. No one, it seems, is at his best.

No one, that is, except maybe Otis Wilson, the Bears` unflappable linebacker. Otis was ready. The man can talk that talk.

There was the business of barking at the opposition. The Bear defense had lapsed into outlandish canine behavior during the 1985 season, and the noise had become a kind of signature tune for Otis and his companions. Inevitably, someone had to pose the question:

``Otis, when you guys bark, is it like an arf or is it more like a woof?``

Wilson had an answer (woof) and a smile, just trying to keep the customer satisfied.

The NFL has tried in much the same way, orchestrating a numbing array of bus rides, photo opportunities, canned interviews and inter-Roman numeral guidance systems for more than 2,000 accredited observers.

No one is quite sure at what point the system stopped working as an exercise in news-gathering, but just about all those present agree that it has.

Access to the players and coaches is controlled with Teutonic efficiency. Three hours a week, en masse.

The press, which generates millions of dollars in all-but-complimentary publicity for the NFL`s championship game, has forfeited its ability to do its job by virtue of the enormous logistical demands.

``It`s reached the point where no respectable newspaper and no TV or radio station of any size can afford not to be here,`` said Edwin Pope, the veteran sports editor of the Miami Herald.

That`s the point. For reasons tucked away in the national psyche, the Super Bowl merits this attention.

According to a survey commissioned by J. Walter Thompson USA after last year`s event, 116 million people watched Super Bowl XIX. ``Super Sunday has become as much a part of Americana as many holidays,`` the survey concluded.

With the margins narrowed, however, the press is pushed in two directions. One is the constant pursuit of the whimsical and humorous, the Refrigerator Perry watch, the essential difference between arf and woof.

Hundreds of quote-starved reporters were charmed by Bear quarterback Jim McMahon`s Monday-night revelation of his weakness for acupuncture, but the press corps was every bit as engaged to learn that William Perry was working up a new commercial for cat food and declining the opportunity to make a movie with punky chanteuse Cyndi Lauper.

The other approach is a focus on those twin anchors of the unmanageable

--momentum and intensity.

For the thousands of reporters in the dark about the Bears and the Patriots, there is considerable pressure to ferret out life stories, pithy anecdotes and and insightful ironies about the players. All that played out in a mob scene worthy of Cecil B. DeMille, and with an hour a day to gather information.

There may have been a time--Super Bowls I through IV, perhaps--when that approach was realistic, but no longer. Nowadays, the vagaries of Super Bowl coverage require comparative stories: Which team is more relaxed? Which team is coping with the rigors of New Orleans and the omnipresent hype. Is it better to be an underdog or a prohibitive favorite, to be Cinderella or Goliath?

Answers to those sorts of questions cannot be supplied until Sunday, when a football game will be played. But it is worth noting that the rest of the news-gathering business is moving toward the Super Bowl shuffle, rather than away from it.

Three thousand journalists went to the U.S.-Soviet summit in Geneva last year, to be informed on the first day in Switzerland that there would be a total news blackout. After the handshake between Reagan and Gorbachev, those 3,000 reporters could have used a little time with the Refrigerator.